Longing

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  But the countryside wasn’t just something that was safe for White to love: it was a love that was safe to write about. It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak. Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water, for example: the tale of a lonely man on the Scottish coast with an Iraqi otter on his sofa. Or the books of the BBC radio naturalist Maxwell Knight, former MI5 spymaster and closet queen. Doubly disallowed to speak openly of his allegiances, Knight wrote a book about hand-rearing a cuckoo called Goo. His obsession with this small, greedy, feathery, parasitic bird is terribly moving; it was a species made of all the hidden elements of Knight’s life: subterfuge, deceit, passing oneself off as something one is not. White is part of this poignant literary tradition. He remained alone all his life. He had a few dispiriting romances with women; nearly married one, almost proposed to another: all were very young. He was frightened of grown women. He confessed that he found their shape unpleasant and could scarcely bring himself to draw it. Much later in life he fell for the teenage son of a friend; it was his last love, hopeless and unreciprocated. But there were always animals. They populated White’s life and his books. Dogs, owls, hawks, snakes, badgers, hedgehogs, even ants. And apart from his much-loved setter Brownie, whom he adored, he insisted his animals were never pets: for pets were ‘almost always fatal, to oneself or to them’. They are ruined by their owners the same way that ‘mothers ruin their children, choke them like ivy’. Pets meant dependency and he had a terror of it. One of the chapters in England Have My Bones is prefaced with a passage from Stella Benson that sheds light on why White dreamed of a hawk: Independence – a state of being self-contained – is the only generosity, I thought, the only charity we can claim of a living creature. We must have nothing to do with another’s bones; that is our only right – to have nothing to do with them. The bone must be the axis of a globe of intrusion-proof glass. One could not say, watching a hawk: ‘I ought perhaps to do this for him.’ Therefore, not only is he safe from me, but I am safe from him.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  This morning he toiled like a tortoise with the shell on his forehead and shoulders, took it out to the wood, arranged the blanket over it and lay on the ground inside. He has no tobacco. He cannot smoke. He can barely move. He has been here for hours, shivering with cold, lying in wait for hawks that would not come. It is a vigil, an ordeal, just as those long nights with the hawk. Another thunderstorm crosses the Ridings. The sky is rusty water and the trees have blurred to ink. Fat raindrops hammer on the blanket and soak through his steaming clothes; there is wet wool and sweat and the electric scent of the storm carried in with the rising wind. He is closer to them now, those long dead men who understood him. He lies in a grave like them. He holds his breath as poachers walk past, men who know the forest in all its perfect parts, men who have the instinctive ability to read the landscape. They do not see him. He has become invisible. It is something like a miracle. The suffering of his body is as naught to the joy of being free from the pain of being seen. 21 Fear It was always there, kneeling by Mabel on her prey, that the thoughts came, when I wondered how I could be doing this, how I could be hunting at all. I hate killing things. I’m loath to tread on spiders and get laughed at for rescuing flies. But now I understood for the first time what bloodthirstiness was all about. It was only when I was aligned with the hawk’s eye that it made sense, but then it made more sense than anything else in the world. When I saw birds fly overhead I’d turn my head and follow them with a kind of longing. Hunting with the hawk took me to the very edge of being a human. Then it took me past that place to somewhere I wasn’t human at all. The hawk in flight, me running after her, the land and the air a pattern of deep and curving detail, sufficient to block out anything like the past or the future, so that the only thing that mattered were the next thirty seconds. I felt the curt lift of autumn breeze over the hill’s round brow, and the need to tack left, to fall over the leeward slope to where the rabbits were. I crept and walked and ran. I crouched. I looked. I saw more than I’d ever seen. The world gathered about me. It made absolute sense.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  You can sense it is the book of a lonely man who felt he was different, who was searching for others like him. Falconry wasn’t a particularly queer sport, though some of the falconers White corresponded with, like Jack Mavrogordato and Ronald Stevens, were gay. Perhaps Blaine, too: he never married. But falconers were a fellowship of men, a ‘monkish elite’, a ‘small, tenacious sect’, as Lord Tweedsmuir described them, who felt a love that other people did not understand. It was a love that was not considered normal, and it was not something they could help. Gilbert Blaine explained that ‘deeply rooted in the nature of certain individuals [exists] some quality which inspires a natural liking for hawks’. The ‘true falconer’, he wrote, ‘is born, not made’. And in years to come White would write of how falconry gave him a comforting sense of unspoken fellowship with like-minded men: It was not until I had kept some hawks by myself that I met another mature falconer, and saw his birds, and talked to him. Then, for the first time, I found the heart turning over with excitement at the spectacle of falcons in first plumage: found that neither of us needed to complete the grammar of a question or answer. It was a revelation: he saw now that right back to prehistory there had been men like him. ‘I thought it was right that I should now be happy to continue as one of a long line,’ he wrote, musing on a photograph that showed a carving of an Assyrian falconer from three thousand years ago. He closed his eyes and imagined reaching back across the centuries to grasp ‘that ancestor’s bony hand, in which all the knuckles were as well-defined as the nutty calf of his bas- relief leg’. To public-school men raised on tales of knights and chivalry, the sensation of time-travelling that falconry provoked could be overwhelming. When the countryside writer J. Wentworth Day went hawking with the British Falconers’ Club in the late 1920s he wrote that with the marshes at your feet, ‘the wind in your face, the hawk on your fist, you may know that you are, for a brief space, an heir of the ages. A minor page of history has turned back a thousand years.’ Trained hawks have a peculiar ability to conjure history because they are in a sense immortal. While individual hawks of different species die, the species themselves remain unchanged. There are no breeds or varieties, because hawks were never domesticated. The birds we fly today are identical to those of five thousand years ago. Civilisations rise and fall, but the hawks stay the same. This gives falconry birds the ability to feel like relics from the distant past. You take a hawk onto your fist. You imagine the falconer of the past doing the same. It is hard not to feel it is the same hawk.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He can slice his mutes 3 yards and always turns proudly round to look at them. I, however, who can pee continually for several minutes (and this he supposes to be some form of slicing) excite his interest and envy. There are many ways to read The Goshawk , and one of them is as a work of suppressed homosexual desire – not for flesh, but for blood, for kinship. You can sense it is the book of a lonely man who felt he was different, who was searching for others like him. Falconry wasn’t a particularly queer sport, though some of the falconers White corresponded with, like Jack Mavrogordato and Ronald Stevens, were gay. Perhaps Blaine, too: he never married. But falconers were a fellowship of men, a ‘monkish elite ’, a ‘small, tenacious sect’, as Lord Tweedsmuir described them, who felt a love that other people did not understand. It was a love that was not considered normal, and it was not something they could help. Gilbert Blaine explained that ‘ deeply rooted in the nature of certain individuals [exists] some quality which inspires a natural liking for hawks’. The ‘true falconer’, he wrote, ‘is born, not made’. And in years to come White would write of how falconry gave him a comforting sense of unspoken fellowship with like-minded men: It was not until I had kept some hawks by myself that I met another mature falconer, and saw his birds, and talked to him. Then, for the first time, I found the heart turning over with excitement at the spectacle of falcons in first plumage: found that neither of us needed to complete the grammar of a question or answer. It was a revelation: he saw now that right back to prehistory there had been men like him. ‘I thought it was right that I should now be happy to continue as one of a long line,’ he wrote, musing on a photograph that showed a carving of an Assyrian falconer from three thousand years ago. He closed his eyes and imagined reaching back across the centuries to grasp ‘ that ancestor’s bony hand, in which all the knuckles were as well-defined as the nutty calf of his bas-relief leg’. To public-school men raised on tales of knights and chivalry, the sensation of time-travelling that falconry provoked could be overwhelming. When the countryside writer J. Wentworth Day went hawking with the British Falconers’ Club in the late 1920s he wrote that with the marshes at your feet, ‘ the wind in your face, the hawk on your fist, you may know that you are, for a brief space, an heir of the ages. A minor page of history has turned back a thousand years.’ Trained hawks have a peculiar ability to conjure history because they are in a sense immortal. While individual hawks of different species die, the species themselves remain unchanged.

• From Educated (2018)

  It was spring when I arrived in the valley. I drove along the highway to the edge of town, then pulled over at the drop-off overlooking the Bear River. From there I could look out over the basin, a patchwork of expectant fields stretching to Buck’s Peak. The mountain was crisp with evergreens, which were luminous set against the browns and grays of shale and limestone. The Princess was as bright as I’d ever seen her. She stood facing me, the valley between us, radiating permanence. The Princess had been haunting me. From across the ocean I’d heard her beckoning, as if I were a troublesome calf who’d wandered from her herd. Her voice had been gentle at first, coaxing, but when I didn’t answer, when I stayed away, it had turned to fury. I had betrayed her. I imagined her face contorted with rage, her stance heavy and threatening. She had been living in my mind like this for years, a stone deity of contempt. But seeing her now, standing watch over her fields and pastures, I realized that I had misunderstood her. She was not angry with me for leaving, because leaving was a part of her cycle. Her role was not to corral the buffalo, not to gather and confine them by force. It was to celebrate their return.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  No. In real life, goshawks resemble sparrowhawks the way leopards resemble housecats. Bigger, yes. But bulkier, bloodier, deadlier, scarier and much, much harder to see. Birds of deep woodland, not gardens, they’re the birdwatchers’ dark grail. You might spend a week in a forest full of gosses and never see one, just traces of their presence. A sudden hush, followed by the calls of terrified woodland birds, and a sense of something moving just beyond vision. Perhaps you’ll find a half-eaten pigeon sprawled in a burst of white feathers on the forest floor. Or you might be lucky: walking in a foggy ride at dawn you’ll turn your head and catch a split-second glimpse of a bird hurtling past and away, huge taloned feet held loosely clenched, eyes set on a distant target. A split second that stamps the image indelibly on your brain and leaves you hungry for more. Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how. But you have a slightly better chance on still, clear mornings in early spring, because that’s when goshawks eschew their world under the trees to court each other in the open sky. That was what I was hoping to see.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It’s a child’s world, full of separate places. Give me a paper and pencil now and ask me to draw a map of the fields I roamed about when I was small, and I cannot do it. But change the question, and ask me to list what was there and I can fill pages. The wood ants’ nest. The newt pond. The oak covered in marble galls. The birches by the motorway fence with fly agarics at their feet. These things were the waypoints of my world. And other places became magic through happenstance. When I found a huge red underwing moth behind the electricity junction box at the end of my road, that box became a magic place. I needed to check behind it every time I walked past, though nothing was ever there. I’d run to check the place where once I’d caught a grass snake, look up at the tree that one afternoon had held a roosting owl. These places had a magical importance, a pull on me that other places did not, however devoid of life they were in all the visits since. And now I’m giving Mabel her head, and letting her fly where she wants, I’ve discovered something rather wonderful. She is building a landscape of magical places too. She makes detours to check particular spots in case the rabbit or the pheasant that was there last week might be there again. It is wild superstition, it is an instinctive heuristic of the hunting mind, and it works. She is learning a particular way of navigating the world, and her map is coincident with mine. Memory and love and magic. What happened over the years of my expeditions as a child was a slow transformation of my landscape over time into what naturalists call a local patch, glowing with memory and meaning. Mabel is doing the same. She is making the hill her own. Mine. Ours. 26 The flight of time It’s turned cold: cold so that saucers of ice lie in the mud, blank and crazed as antique porcelain. Cold so the hedges are alive with Baltic blackbirds; so cold that each breath hangs like parcelled seafog in the air. The blue sky rings with it, and the bell on Mabel’s tail is dimmed with condensation. Cold, cold, cold. My feet crack the ice in the mud as I trudge uphill. And because the squeaks and grinding harmonics of fracturing ice sound to Mabel like a wounded animal, every step I take is met with a convulsive clench of her toes. Where the world isn’t white with frost, it’s striped green and brown in strong sunlight, so the land is particoloured and snapping backwards to dawn and forwards to dusk. The days, now, are a bare six hours long.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  History collapses when you hold a hawk, just as it does for my friends with their small and precious objects. The vast differences between you and that long-dead person are forgotten. You cannot help but assume that they saw the world as you see it. And this has troubling ramifications. It is a small step from imagining you are the same as that long-dead falconer to presuming that the land you walk upon has been walked upon by people like you since time immemorial. And the ancestors falconers have chosen to imagine tend to have been a cut above the common crowd. ‘Falconry is certainly of high descent,’ wrote the falconer Gage Earl Freeman in 1859. ‘Look at the pride – the honest noble pride – of ancestry!’ When a friend countered this by saying his own love for falconry was ‘perfectly independent of any feeling for antiquity or the middle ages, for which he cared nothing’, Freeman’s response was blunt. ‘I believe he was mistaken.’ But hawks did not always grant you communion with lords and earls and kings. At Chapel Green a hawk let White feel part of the community of a pre-Reformation English village. It made him feel at home. When I was small I’d loved falconry’s historical glamour. I treasured it in the same way children treasure the hope that they might be like the children in books: secretly magical, part of some deeper, mysterious world that makes them something out of the ordinary. But that was a long time ago. I did not feel like that any more. I was not training a hawk because I wished to feel special. I did not want the hawk to make me feel I was striding righteously across the lands of my long-lost ancestors. I had no use for history, no use for time at all. I was training the hawk to make it all disappear.

• From Educated (2018)

  study, just as I’d seen him do on a thousand nights. I didn’t study history or math. I studied religion. I read the Book of Mormon twice. I read the New Testament, once quickly, then a second time more slowly, pausing to make notes, to cross- reference, and even to write short essays on doctrines like faith and sacrifice. No one read the essays; I wrote them for myself, the way I imagined Tyler had studied for himself and himself only. I worked through the Old Testament next, then I read Dad’s books, which were mostly compilations of the speeches, letters and journals of the early Mormon prophets. Their language was of the nineteenth century—stiff, winding, but exact—and at first I understood nothing. But over time my eyes and ears adjusted, so that I began to feel at home with those fragments of my people’s history: stories of pioneers, my ancestors, striking out across the American wilderness. While the stories were vivid, the lectures were abstract, treatises on obscure philosophical subjects, and it was to these abstractions that I devoted most of my study. In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who’d deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand. — BY THE TIME THE SNOW on the mountain began to melt, my hands were thickly callused. A season in the junkyard had honed my reflexes: I’d learned to listen for the low grunt that escaped Dad’s lips whenever he tossed something heavy, and when I heard it I hit the dirt. I spent so much time flat in the mud, I didn’t salvage much. Dad joked I was as slow as molasses running uphill. The memory of Tyler had faded, and with it had faded his music, drowned out by the crack of metal crashing into metal. Those were the sounds that played in my head at night now—the jingle of corrugated tin, the short tap of copper wire, the thunder of iron. I had entered into the new reality. I saw the world through my father’s eyes. I saw the angels, or at least I imagined I saw them, watching us

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  He tried exposing his isolated fledglings to looped tapes of the songs of other species: could they be persuaded to sing like tree pipits? It was a groundbreaking piece of research into developmental learning, but it was also a science soaked deep in Cold War anxieties. The questions Thorpe was asking were those of a post-war West obsessed with identity and frightened of brainwashing. How do you learn who you are? Can your allegiances be changed? Can you be trusted? What makes you a chaffinch? Where do you come from? Thorpe discovered that wild chaffinches from different places had different dialects. I listened carefully to the bird outside. Yes, its song was different from the song of Surrey chaffinches I’d learned as a child . It was thinner , less complicated; seemed to cut off before it was properly finished. I thought I would like to hear Surrey chaffinches again. I thought of sad birds in soundproofed cages, and how your earliest experiences teach you who you are. I thought of the house from my dream. I thought of home. And then, with a slow, luxuriant thrill, I realised that everything was different about the house I was in. It was the hawk. I shut my eyes. The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent. It was about to begin. In the half-light through the drawn curtains she sits on her perch, relaxed, hooded, extraordinary. Formidable talons, wicked, curved black beak, sleek, café-au-lait front streaked thickly with cocoa-coloured teardrops, looking for all the world like some cappuccino samurai. ‘Hello hawk,’ I whisper, and at the sound she draws her feathers tight in alarm. ‘Hush,’ I tell myself, and the hawk. Hush . Then I put on my falconer’s glove, step forward and take her up onto my fist, untying the falconer’s knot that secures her leash to the perch. She bates. Bating . A ‘ headlong dive of rage and terror, by which a leashed hawk leaps from the fist in a wild bid for freedom’. That’s how White described it in The Goshawk . The falconer’s duty, he explained, ‘is to lift the hawk back to the fist with his other hand in gentleness and patience’. I lift her back onto my fist with gentleness and patience. Her feet grip the glove convulsively. This perch is moving . I feel her mind grappling with novelty. But still it is the only thing I understand. I shall hold it tight . I persuade her to step onto a perch on a modified set of scales. Hawks have a flying weight, just as boxers have a fighting weight. A hawk that’s too fat, or high , has little interest in flying and won’t return to the falconer’s call. Hawks too low are awful things: spare, unhappy, lacking the energy to fly with fire and style.

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  It was an English bird. When White died of heart failure in January 1964, far from home in a cabin on the SS Exeter in Greece, his friends were concerned for his reputation. There were things in his journals they did not want to come to light, matters relating to his sexuality that if spoken of at all, had to be handled with rare delicacy. They needed to find a suitable biographer. They chose Sylvia Townsend Warner, because she had corresponded with White, and he had liked her books. And for another reason: she was gay. ‘ You will be sympathetic to his character , ’ Michael Howard informed her . ‘If it is a sufficiently bad character I should certainly be sympathetic to it,’ she replied. She travelled to Alderney and there, walking about White’s house, she found her subject. He was there, in his possessions. She wrote to her friend William Maxwell: His sewing basket with an unfinished hawk-hood, his litter of fishing-flies, his books, his awful ornaments presented by his hoi polloi friends, his vulgar toys bought at Cherbourg Fairs, his neat rows of books on flagellation – everything was there, defenceless as a corpse. And so was he, suspicious, morose, and determined to despair. I have never felt such an imminent haunt. An imminent haunt . Her phrase gives me pause. Because that was what White was doing as I trained my hawk; he was there even as I dreamed of the vanishing gos. Haunting me. Not in the tapping-on-the-window white-sheet ghost-in-the-corridor way, but it was a haunting all the same. Ever since I’d read The Goshawk , I’d wondered what kind of man White was and why he had tied himself to a hawk he seemed to hate. And when I trained my own hawk a little space opened, like a window through leaves, onto this other life, in which was a man who was hurt, and a hawk who was being hurt, and I saw them both more clearly. Like White I wanted to cut loose from the world, and I shared, too, his desire to escape to the wild, a desire that can rip away all human softness and leave you stranded in a world of savage, courteous despair. The book you are reading is my story. It is not a biography of Terence Hanbury White. But White is part of my story all the same. I have to write about him because he was there. When I trained my hawk I was having a quiet conversation, of sorts, with the deeds and works of a long-dead man who was suspicious , morose , determined to despair .

• From H Is for Hawk (2014)

  On the mantelpiece, birds’ wings. A spill-jar. Patterned wallpaper. A mirror. Books everywhere. He’s spent £66 on deep-pile carpets, bought a winged brocade armchair and laid in a stock of Madeira. Upstairs he’s transformed the guest bedroom into a fairy-tale room of secret, romantic exuberance: mirrors and gilt, blue bed-linen and a golden bedspread, surrounded by candles. Still, he can’t bring himself to sleep in it. The camp bed in the other room with the brown curtains will suffice. And the hawk will live in the barn outside, and they will both call this place home. The Victorian terrace loomed and swayed in the summer dusk. I walked to my door, box in my arms. I don’t remember opening the box that night. What I remember is my bare feet treading on carpet and the weight of the hawk on my fist. Her shape, long and haunted, and the hitch of her nervous shoulders as she stepped backwards onto the shadow of the bowperch on my living-room floor. I remember thinking of the passage in The Sword in the Stone where a falconer took a goshawk back onto his own fist, ‘reassuming him like a lame man putting on his accustomed wooden leg, after it had been lost’. Yes, holding the hawk for the first time felt like that. Exactly like that. Mutely I crawled up the stairs and fell into bed. The hawk was here, the journey was over. That night I dreamed of my father. It wasn’t the usual dream of a family reunited. In the dream I’m searching for something in a house, an empty house with pale squares on the walls where pictures should be. I can’t find what I am looking for. I open an upstairs door onto a room that is not like the others. Three white walls run with water and the far wall is gone. No wall at all: just air, falling into the pale violet of a city evening. Below me is a bombsite. Tons of bricks and rubble, rosebay willowherb blooming in drifts between broken rafters and spars that are ruined chairs and the shadows between all these things are thickening to night. But they are not what I am looking at. Because standing on top of the tallest pile of bricks is a small boy with sandy hair. His face is turned away, but I recognise him immediately, and not just because he’s wearing the same short trousers and lumpy grey jacket in a photograph in our family album.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I believe it was Bristol; or it may have been Bath...’ ‘Not London, then?’ ‘Oh no, certainly not London. Now, was it Brighton ... ?’ I turned away from him, to gaze back up at Mrs Milne’s house - at the window of my old room, and at the balcony where I had liked, in summer-time, to sit. When I looked at the man again, he had his little girl in his arms, and the wind had caught her golden hair and made it flap about his cheeks: and I remembered them both, then, as the father and daughter that I had seen clapping their hands to the sound of a mandolin, on that balmy June evening, in the week I met Diana. They had lost their home and been given a new one. They had been visited by that charity-visitor with the romantic-sounding name. Florence! I did not know that I had remembered her. I had not thought of her at all, for a year and more. If only I might meet her, now! She found houses for the poor; she might find a house for me. She had been kind to me once - wouldn’t she be kind, if I appealed to her, a second time? I thought of her comely face, and her curling hair. I had lost Diana, I had lost Zena; and now I had lost Mrs Milne and Grace. In all of London she was the closest thing I had, at that moment, to a friend - and it was a friend just then that, above all else, I longed for. On the balcony above me, the man had turned away. Now I called him back: ‘Hey, mister!’ I walked closer to the wall of the tenement, and gazed up at him: he and his daughter leaned from the balcony rail - she looked like an angel on the ceiling of a church. I said, ‘You won’t know me; but I lived here once, with Mrs Milne. I am looking for a girl, who called on you when you moved in. She worked for the people that found you your flat.’ He frowned. ‘A girl, you say?’ ‘A girl with curly hair. A plain-faced girl called Florence. Don’t you know who I mean? Don’t you have the name of the charity she worked for? It was run by a lady - a very clever-looking lady. The lady played the mandolin.’ He had continued to frown, and to scratch at his head; but at this last detail he brightened. ‘That one,’ he said; ‘yes, I remember her. And that gal what helped her, that was your chum, was it?’ I said it was. Then: ‘And the charity? Do you remember them, and where their rooms are?’ ‘Where their rooms are, let me see ...

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Every time a place came up there was a crush of girls queuing for it at the stage door, all just the same as me, or prettier, or perter - or hungrier, and so more willing to kiss the chairman for the promise of a season’s work, or a week’s, or even a night’s.’ Her grandmother had died; she had joined a dancing troupe and toured the seaside towns of Kent and the South Coast, doing end-of-pier shows three times a night. She frowned when she spoke about these times, and her voice was bitter, or weary; she would place a hand beneath her chin, and rest her head upon it, and close her eyes. ‘Oh, it was hard,’ she’d say, ‘so hard ... And you never made a friend, because you were never in one place long enough. And all the stars thought themselves too grand to talk to you, or were afraid you would copy their routines. And the crowds were cruel, and made you cry ...’ The thought of Kitty weeping brought the tears to my own eyes; and seeing me so affected, she’d give a smile, and a wink, and a stretch, and say in her best swell accent: ‘But those days are all behind me now, don’t you know, and I am on the path to fame and fortune. Since I changed my name and became a masher the whole world loves me; and Tricky Reeves loves me most of all, and pays me like a prince, to prove it!’ And then we would smile together, because we both knew that if she really were a masher Tricky’s wages would barely keep her in champagne; but my smile would be a little troubled for I knew, too, that her contract was due to expire at the end of August, and then she would have to move to another theatre - to Margate, perhaps, she said, or Broadstairs, if they would have her. I couldn’t bear to think what I would do when she was gone. What my family made of my trips backstage, my marvellous new status as Miss Butler’s pal and unofficial dresser, I am not sure. They were, as I have said, impressed; but they were also troubled.

• From The Four Vision Quests of Jesus (2015)

  There are messengers, angels moving back and forth from Earth to heaven, carrying instructions to faithful men and women, people like Samuel who heard the voice call his name, and Mary whose response to the voice became enshrined as The Magnificat. So checking off a no to the question about hearing the voice of God becomes something of a joke. It bows to the conventions of our society where hearing “voices” has a negative meaning, but it also reminds us that we come from a religious culture that historically has expected this kind of an exchange to be possible. If you come from both a Christian and a Native American background then you are doubly likely to accept the reality of the voice of God being real because Native American tradition is also full of stories of communication between the realm of the divine and the world of humanity. The Native American religious tradition in North America accepts the idea of close contact between God and human beings through the agency of many spirits who carry the divine message with them. These spirits are not phantoms, but are most often seen as living creatures in the natural world chosen to bring the sacred word. Buffalo, bear, eagle, raven: many creatures can be conduits for the voice of God. What happened to me that afternoon in South Dakota, therefore, is not something so strange when seen from the perspective of ancient Christian and Native American spirituality. In fact, I believe it is quite common. I believe many people hear the voice of God, even those who try not to hear it. We hear it because we need to hear it, because without it we cannot find the transformation we need. I needed to hear the voice. I had been waiting for it for years. My odyssey through so many indigenous communities had been a continuation of the quest that had begun years before when I received a vision from God. Over time I came to realize it was leading me to find a spiritual path that would unify Christianity and Native American tradition. Until I could do that, I would never rest easy in my life. Like a lost piece to my own puzzle I would never find a sense of being whole. I needed to hear the voice of God, to receive the wisdom of God, to help me discover what I could not find alone. That is what I said to my bishop when I told him I could not be ordained. After three years in seminary, on the threshold of ordination as a priest in the church, I informed my bishop that I could not go forward because I was not ready. I was incomplete. I was Native American and Christian, but I was not sure what that meant.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I said. ‘What does all that matter now? It matters nothing!’ ‘Doesn’t it?’ she said. I felt my heart begin to hammer. When I did not answer, only continued to stare at her, she took a step towards me and began to talk, very fast and low. ‘Oh Nan, so many times I thought about finding you, and planned what I would say when I did. I cannot leave you now without saying it!’ ‘I don’t want to hear it,’ I said in sudden terror; I believe I even put my hands to my ears, to try to block out the sound of her murmurs. But she caught at my arm and talked on, into my face. ‘You must hear it! You must know. You mustn’t think that I did what I did easily, or thoughtlessly. You mustn’t think it did not - break my heart.’ ‘Why did you do it, then?’ ‘Because I was a fool! Because I thought my life upon the stage was dearer to me than anything. Because I thought that I would be a star. Because, of course, I did not ever think that I would really, really lose you ...’ She hesitated. Outside the tent the bustle of the day went on: children ran shrieking; stall-holders called and argued; flags and pamphlets fluttered in the May breezes. She took a breath. She said: ‘Nan, come back to me.’ Come back to me ... One part of me reached out to her at once, leapt to her like a pin to a magnet; I believe the very same part of me would leap to her again - would go on leaping to her, if she went on asking me, for ever. Then another part of me remembered, and remembers still. ‘Come back to you?’ I said. ‘With you, still Walter’s wife?’ ‘All that means nothing,’ she said quickly. ‘There’s nothing - like that - between him and me now. If we were only a little careful ...’ ‘Careful!’ I said: the word had made me flinch. ‘Careful! Careful! That’s all I ever had from you. We were so careful, we might as well have been dead!’ I shook myself free of her. ‘I have a new girl now, who’s not ashamed to be my sweetheart.’ But Kitty came close, and seized my arm again. ‘That girl with the baby?’ she said, nodding back into the tent. ‘You don’t love her, I can see it in your face. Not as you loved me. Don’t you remember how it was? You were mine, before anyone’s; you belong with me. You don’t belong with her and her sort, talking all this foolish political stuff. Look at your clothes, how plain and cheap they are!

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Uncle Joe said, ‘Well, that’s a shame, that is. You should hear her in the kitchen, Miss Butler. She’s a regular song-bird, she is, then: a regular lark. Makes your heart turn over, to hear her.’ There were murmurs of agreement throughout the room, and I saw Kitty look blinkingly my way. Then George whispered rather loudly that I must be saving my voice for serenading Freddy, and there was a fresh round of laughter that set me gazing and blushing into my lap. Kitty looked bemused. She asked then, ‘Who is Freddy?’ ‘Freddy is Nancy’s young feller,’ said Davy. ‘A very handsome chap. She must’ve boasted about him to you?’ ‘No,’ said Kitty, ‘she has not.’ She said it lightly, but I glanced up and saw that her eyes were strange, and almost sad. It was true that I had never mentioned Fred to her. The fact was, I barely thought of him as my beau these days, for since her arrival in Canterbury I had had no evenings spare to spend with him. He had recently sent me a letter to say, did I still care? - and I had put the letter in a drawer, and forgotten to reply. There was more chaff about Freddy, then; I was glad when one of Rhoda’s sisters caused a fuss, by snatching the harmonica from George and giving us a tune so horrible it made the boys all shout at her, and pull her hair, to make her stop. While they quarrelled and swore, Kitty leaned towards me and said softly, ‘Will you take me to your room, Nan, or somewhere quiet, for a bit - just you and me?’ She looked so grave suddenly I feared that she might faint. I got up, and made a path for her across the crowded room, and told my mother I was taking her upstairs; and Mother - who was gazing troubledly at Rhoda’s sister, not knowing whether to laugh at her or to scold - gave us a nod, distractedly, and we escaped. The bedroom was cooler than the parlour, and dimmer, and - although we could still hear shouts, and stamping, and blasts from the harmonica - wonderfully calm compared to the room we had just left. The window was raised, and Kitty crossed to it at once and placed her arms upon the sill. Closing her eyes against the breeze that blew in from the bay, she took a few deep, grateful breaths. ‘Are you poorly?’ I said. She turned to me and shook her head, and smiled; but again, her smile seemed sad. ‘Just tired.’ My jug and bowl were on the side. I poured a little water out and carried it to her, for her to wash her hands and splash her face.

• From A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (BDB) (1907)

  2. If only .../ i.e. O that / would that / (cf. 6 ydp, 646( usu. sq. perf., as Nu 147? 29.3 if only we had died in the land of Egypt! 20° Jos 77 13) ולו הוּאַלְנוּ‎ 18 48"°63™; sq. גא *ש‎ 22% ; sq. impf. Gn 17% לו יחיה‎ O that Ishmael might live before thee ! Jb 6?; sq. juss. Gn 30 לו יהי‎ כדברך‎ ; sq. imy. 23" אם אתה ל שמעני‎ if thou— 0 that thou wouldst hear me! (+ prob. v® לאמר : לג שמעני‎ for ,לאמר ל3: ש'‎ and similarly *( .---140. also prob. ND for Mas. לא‎ Ju 21” (with NAY כִּי‎ for NYZ), 18 13 20% Jb 9% (sq. (יש‎ ; and perh. 14* (Ew Ko). il sha Gn 43° Surg 28 2°27", elsewhere לולי‎ if not, unless (fr. % if, and xb, by dissim. Gia) for לא‎ nots cf. Ar. 535), the neg. of 35, and used similarly :—a. sq. pf., Ju 1 4'* לולא‎ מצאתם‎ xd... חרשתם‎ wnless ye had ploughed conj. on this account, therefore, 530 6 4:80 ; (+ DAD) ; לְבִים‎ Dn 11% (v. Bael , לוה with my heifer, ye would not have found ou my riddle, 1 ₪ 25* (second ‘3 resumptive: * 1 ץ,(8‎ 1069; with apod. introd. by עַתָּה‎ % Gn 31° 43"; by כי) 27 28 אָז‎ resumptive): by DYDD Is 1°; with an aposiop. ש‎ 27% IT had not believed.../ b. sq. impf. Dt 32! אמרתי, , , לולי אגור‎ 1 should have 810 except I dreaded, 806. 0. sq. ptep., 2 ב‎ d. without a verb, ¥ 947 (apod. ,(כמעט‎ 119" (apod. 38). In the later language, ~ 124" לוּלי שָ-‎ (apod. (אז"‎ except that. . . (cf. Aran Stave 1 ₪ ץש‎ 106”, Tae oie אילוּלי‎ VY 275 2). Rd. also לולי‎ for °38 in Nu22 (apod. TAY D See further on ל‎ and לוּלא‎ Dr 5 189-145. Gilt 487 68 tind poet. for 0 Job 27% 297! 38” 40%, like 122 for 3, 122 for 2: see in. + [and], cra, בים‎ a. gent.pl. Lybien in .א‎ Africa, W. of Egypt;— Na 3° (+038 2Ch12° (G 4896 ; + DYI¥1D, DD, (ְכּוּשִים‎ { 6. מִצְרַיִם‎ Dw), Theod. AiBvev ; prob.= חבִים‎ (q.v.) Gn 10% = 1 Ch 17 AGL AaBremp ; rea לובים‎ perh.also Je 46°(for 9 ond, cf. Sta 7am G Avdor (OB 7b. = AiBves); G Sm Co State Berthol rd. לוב‎ Ez 30° (for 6 33, q.v.) ₪ WMM4:: Eur. 115. 2%

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  A dozen people looked our way, and smiled and clapped. At last he stumbled and almost fell, then put me down with a thump. ‘Now,’ he said breathlessly, ‘tell me I ain’t a marvellous dancer.’ ‘You ain’t,’ I said. ‘You’ve made me giddy as a fish, and’ - I felt at the front of my dress - ‘you have spoiled my sash!’ ‘I’ll fix that for you,’ he said, reaching for my waist again. I gave a yelp, and stepped out of his grasp. ‘No you won’t! You can push off and leave me in peace.’ Now he seized me, and tickled me so that I giggled. Being tickled always makes me laugh, however little I care for the tickler; but after several more minutes of this kind of thing he at last gave up on me, and went back to his pals in the band. I ran my hands over my sash again. I feared he really had spoiled it, but couldn’t see well enough to be sure. I finished my drink with a gulp - it was, I suppose, my sixth or seventh glass - and slipped from the stage. I made my way first to the lavatory, then headed downstairs to the change-room. This had been opened tonight only so that the ladies should have a place to hang their coats, and it was cold and empty and rather dim; but it had a looking-glass: and it was to this that I now stepped, squinting and tugging at my dress to pull it straight. I had been there for no longer than a minute when there came the sound of footsteps in the passageway beyond, and then a silence. I turned my head to see who was there, and found that it was Kitty. She had her shoulder against the doorframe and her arms folded. She wasn’t standing as one normally stands - as she usually stood - in an evening gown. She was standing as she did when she was on stage, with her trousers on - rather cockily. Her face was turned towards me and I couldn’t see her rope of hair, or the swell of her breasts. Her cheeks were very pale; there was a stain upon her skirt where some champagne had dripped upon it from an over-spilling glass. ‘Wot cheer, Kitty,’ I said. But she did not return my smile, only watched me, levelly. I looked uncertainly back to the glass, and continued working at my sash. When she spoke at last, I knew at once that she was rather drunk. ‘Seen something you fancy?’ she said. I turned to her again in surprise, and she took a step into the room. ‘What?’ ‘I said, “Seen something you fancy, Nancy?” Everybody else here tonight seems to have. Seems to have seen something that has rather caught their eye.’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Alice did not stir. I squinted at my watch: half-past eleven. I wondered, again, what Kitty was doing; and sent a mental message through the night, to Stamford Hill, to make her pause - whatever her business was just then - and remember to think of me, in Whitstable. My visit, after that poor start, was not brilliant. I had arrived on a Sunday, and the following days, of course, were working ones. I didn’t fall asleep, that first night, until very late, but the next morning I woke when Alice woke, at half-past six, and forced myself to rise and eat my breakfast with the others, at the parlour-table. Then, however, I didn’t know whether to offer to take up my old duties in the kitchen, with the oyster-knife - I couldn’t tell whether they would like it or expect it, or even whether I could bear to try it. In the end I drifted down with them and found I wasn’t needed anyway; for they had a girl, now, to sever and beard the natives, and she was just as quick, it seemed, as I had been. I stood beside her - she was rather pretty - and made some half-hearted passes with my knife at a dozen or so shells ... But the water chilled and stung me, and soon I preferred to sit and watch - then I closed my eyes and placed my head upon my arms, and listened to the hum of gossip from the restaurant, and the bubble of the pans ... In short, I fell asleep; and only woke when Father, hurrying by me, stumbled over my skirts and spilled a pot of liquor. Then it was suggested that I go upstairs - out of their way, they meant. And so I passed the afternoon alone, alternately nodding over the Illustrated Police News and pacing the parlour to keep myself awake - and wondering, frankly, why I had come home at all. The next day, if anything, was worse. Mother said straight out that I must not think of spoiling my dress and hurting my hands by trying to help them in the kitchen; that I was here to have a holiday, not to work. I had read the Police News from cover to cover: all there was now was Father’s Fish Trades Gazette, and I couldn’t bear the thought of a day upstairs with that.